In poking at the market today, I did note a few things about silver....
One, I found a number of smaller silver explorers who put out PR back in August/September announcing that Sprott had just taken a position in ownership of their shares... The ownership positions taken were not large... couple hundred thousand shares kind of thing... But there was not any contribution of capital in the deal, it seems, Sprott just bought shares... without his participation advancing anything... except the share price. Without exception, each of those stocks surged by a 3x to 4x... from a dime to $0.30 type thing. Meaning Sprott is making money just by telling people what he's buying... making it easier to raise money in this environment, where there is a lot money flowing to explorers again now... after a decade and more of none.
Noting the influence on share price... it is probably not time dependent... as I posted the list of Sprott miners he's invested in the other day... how much is built it to the share price now... and how much is a permanent bias that remains, and will matter, as other investors look for silver stocks ? The ROE sort doesn't seem to account for it... "Sprott's influence" was still just a wrecking ball at USUS... for those shareholders who knew the value before he arrived... and watched it evaporate under a new management... who ended up giving 40% of it to Sprott... for essentially no net gain... while adding 20 million in debt... while turning a profitable mine into a money loser. Needs more study. Need a metric that better accounts for the impacts in aggregate... while pointing fingers in the right direction: management, management, management.
Another I noted... given silver persistently up, and gold persistently down... while investors are looking for pure silver plays that are hard to find... is that now a number of the smaller exploration companies have suddenly reversed field on how they structure reports of drilling results. The norm has always been to report grams per ton in gold, and grams per ton in silver... other metals... and then report the aggregate value as gold equivalent. Now, instead, they're reporting out the gold and other metals as silver equivalent... a little bit of gold suddenly becoming a whole lot of silver... making them look like future silver producing monsters... when they're not. Caveat emptor.
As silver is doing well now, there is also a shift in focus occurring among explorers. A lot of juniors with gold in their names and a portfolio of gold properties... are spending their exploration $ on advancing silver properties instead. That makes the sorting a lot harder... as you have read their PR's to figure out what they are now... But as I began shifting focus today to look at smaller companies, and began creating the gold list to pair with the silver list... it wasn't too much of a problem. I added about a dozen names to the silver miners list, a good number of which say they are gold companies... and moved the gold companies I had there off the silver list to a gold list... and split the gold list between '"gold" (producers, developers, quality explorers) and "penny gold"...
More impacts apparent in the shallow end of the pool... with a large number of companies that are essentially shell companies... dusting themselves off in preparation. Many have charts on Yahoo that won't show any history prior to January... leaving you thinking, if you're not careful, that its just a $0.40 stock moving higher for over a month... and not a moribund play that was trading for a nickel in December... with little reason to trade higher now. The joints are a bit rusty... but they still remember how to dance to the tune... And then, a few like that... still in the pennies... while sitting quietly on valuable properties that no one has thought about for a couple of years... assuming they are still there ? Shell games... in a double entrendre.
Trading on the day looked like "more of the same"... with some doing better than others, but with the overall trend in silver shares still higher... and the trend in gold shares mostly lower... with a few exceptions in each.
Sorted the royalty plays by ROE and note one in there I don't think I had listed in March 2020
WPM ROE 8 39.84 0.20 0.50% : Wheaton Precious Metals Corp.
FNV ROE 5 113.77 1.57 1.40% : Franco-Nevada Corporation
MMX ROE 3 5.27 0.15 2.93% : Maverix Metals Inc.
SAND ROE 2.3 6.57 0.08 1.23% : Sandstorm Gold Ltd.
EMX ROE -3.95 3.4200 -0.2300 -6.30% : EMX Royalty Corporation
OR ROE -9.9 11.20 -0.32 -2.78% : Osisko Gold Royalties Ltd
MTA ROE -12 9.48 -0.37 -3.76% : Metalla Royalty & Streaming Ltd.
ELYGF ROE -24.5 0.7284 0.0008 0.11% : Ely Gold Royalties Inc.
More to follow...
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